PHILADELPHIA, May 18 (UPI) -- The first military use of outer space was the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The second was defensive systems designed to stop them.

Missile defense against ICBMs has never worked. Despite five decades of failure, the idea has continued to haunt military planners since the Cold War began.

While the dream -- the idea that a bomb, once launched on a missile, could be stopped in mid-flight by another, very precisely aimed missile -- never materialized, the history of missile defense offers a number of important insights into the extension of military power into outer space. Furthermore, much of the technology developed in ground-based missile defense is being exploited to design missile defense launched from outer space, and is also applicable to space weaponization.

To date, the United States has spent almost $150 billion on missile defense since President Dwight D. Eisenhower first proposed a modest program. The billions of dollars for long-range missile defense, which is a substantial part of this figure, have also necessarily limited defense spending in such critical areas as counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as underfunded aspects of homeland security, not to mention programs for the disadvantaged in the United States and abroad.

If anything, these figures are likely to rise. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the annual cost of the current Bush administration's missile-defense plans could almost double from $10.4 billion, the largest single program in the fiscal year 2007, to $19 billion by 2013, and total $247 billion from 2006 through fiscal 2024.

Despite a string of test failures and earlier indications that the program might be curtailed, the deployment of missile defenses in Alaska and California continues, and is being expanded. To shield the government from continuing criticism, the testing is being increasingly classified and restricted.

It would appear that Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has successfully defended the missile system, despite the fact that it doesn't work; a clearer example of pork-barreling could hardly be found.

U.S. President George W. Bush has banked on the fact that the American people support missile defense, if it works. A poll in March of 2006 indicated "more than 70 percent of citizens throughout the state of New York support a missile defense system with the ability to protect the United States from a nuclear, chemical or biological attack."

The question is, of course, does it work?

To date, however, the military has not declared the system operational, and has even suggested that it might never be. As an alternative, the Missile Defense Agency continues to pursue boost-phase defenses and is experimenting with the idea of orbiting satellites in outer space that will directly ram into the opposing missiles.

Called "kinetic kill vehicles," this defense system, like boost-phase defenses, is fraught with enormous problems and is perhaps even less feasible than the failed ground-based system in Alaska and California.

Meanwhile, however, the system that employs sensors to track and collide with a missile in space might, with only small modifications, be used to knock out satellites, and is now forming the technical basis for anti-satellite warfare. As the Bush administration moves toward space weaponization and toward extending missile defense from Earth-based to space-based, it is important that the administration's history of deceit in claiming the need for long-range missile defense and of deploying a system that doesn't work be kept clearly in mind. How much longer should this charade be allowed to go on before the United States puts its money and effort into more feasible measures of securing the heavens, including multilateral diplomacy?

Instead, it is moving in exactly the opposite direction: toward the weaponization of outer space.

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(Helen Caldicott is president of the Washington-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute. She was a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. Craig Eisendrath is the chair of the Project for Nuclear Awareness and co-founder of the National Constitution Center. This piece originally appears in Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath's book, "War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space," and is published with the permission of The New Press.)

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